Daejeon

Daejeon barely existed before the railway. The area was farmland at the meeting of small rivers in the Chungcheong plain, its name a Sino-Korean rendering of the older Korean Hanbat, meaning large field. When the Seoul–Busan railway opened a station here in 1904, a town grew around it almost immediately, and the Japanese colonial administration made the junction a centre for shipping rice and goods out of the interior. A second line west towards Mokpo, and later the road network, confirmed its position as the crossroads of the country.

The Korean War hit the young city hard. In the summer of 1950 it briefly became the seat of the South Korean government after Seoul fell, and heavy fighting in and around it left much of the centre destroyed, with large-scale killings of civilians and prisoners in the area during that summer. Reconstruction followed through the 1950s and 1960s, and the city grew quickly as people moved in from the surrounding countryside.

The decisive change came in the 1970s, when the government began moving research institutes out of Seoul to a new science town at Daedeok. KAIST relocated to the city, and dozens of national laboratories, the space and atomic energy agencies and corporate research centres followed, gathering much of the country's public research effort in one district. The 1993 world exposition on the riverbank put it on the international map and left the Expo grounds and their landmark tower behind. Daejeon became a metropolitan city in 1989, the Dunsan district was built as a second centre in the 1990s, and high-speed trains arrived in 2004, putting Seoul within about fifty minutes.

Daejeon's self-image is built on science and on being the country's crossroads. The research institutes and universities give it an unusually highly educated population, a steady flow of visiting scientists and students, and a calendar of science festivals, lectures and open days that few Korean cities can match. Residents are used to explaining that the city is not old, and they tend to point to what it does rather than what it has kept.

The Chungcheong manner shapes daily life. People from this region are known across Korea for speaking slowly, hedging rather than confronting and preferring understatement, and the local dialect and its drawn-out endings are the subject of affectionate national jokes. Hospitality is straightforward and unshowy, and the city is often described by Koreans as comfortable rather than exciting.

Popular culture here runs through food and baseball. The professional club draws devoted support, and its fixtures order the summer for many families. The bakery in the old downtown has become a genuine civic symbol, with queues that visitors join as a matter of course. Older traditions survive at the edges — the Confucian shrines associated with Song Si-yeol, the clan-lineage park above the river, and the Buddhist temples on Gyeryongsan, a mountain long regarded as a place of spiritual power and still home to several religious communities.

About 1.4 million people live in Daejeon, spread across five districts, and it is the fifth-largest metropolis in South Korea. Most residents live in apartment complexes, from the dense older blocks around the centre to the tall estates of Dunsan and Yuseong, and the population is comparatively young because of the universities and the research campuses.

The economy is unlike other Korean cities. Public research institutes, the defence and space agencies, universities and technology firms in the Daedeok district employ tens of thousands of people, alongside government offices, hospitals, the railway and a belt of manufacturing on the outskirts. That base makes the city stable but has not produced the wealth of the capital region, and many graduates still move to Seoul or to the industrial cities for work.

Daily rhythms are those of a commuter city of medium size: the metro and buses busy morning and evening, shopping and cinemas concentrated in Dunsan, students filling Gungdong at night, and families walking in the arboretum and on the hill paths at weekends. The recurring concerns are the drift of population and offices towards Sejong next door, the decline of the old downtown, summer heat in the basin, and the search for industries to sit alongside the laboratories.

Daejeon's most famous food is bread. Sungsimdang, opened by a refugee family near the station in the 1950s, grew into an institution that Koreans travel to the city for, best known for twigim soboro, a fried bun with a crumbly top and a red-bean filling, and for its chive bread. Buying a box to take home has become a standard ritual of any visit.

The savoury speciality is kalguksu, wheat dough rolled and cut by hand into flat noodles and served in broth. The city has a long-standing reputation for it, with versions made on anchovy, beef, chicken or seafood stock, some with perilla seed or with a red chilli edge. Close behind is dubu-durigi, tofu cooked with pork and a fierce chilli sauce in a shallow pan on the table, a cheap dish tied to the older neighbourhoods.

Otherwise the city eats the food of the Chungcheong plain and of Korea at large. Markets sell ginseng from Geumsan, an hour to the south and the country's main ginseng town, along with mushrooms, chestnuts and mountain vegetables; ginseng chicken soup is common in midsummer. The student quarters run on grilled pork belly, fried chicken and cheap noodle dishes, the Korean-Chinese restaurants on jjajangmyeon, and the cafés on coffee and pastries — Daejeon has an unusually large bakery trade for its size, the bread city reputation being one the place has cultivated deliberately.